With the development of wireless networks, streaming media services like video on demand and live, video based on streaming media systems are more and more popular. In a streaming media service process, a play list can be created to realize the continuous playing of multiple audio and video files. Creating a play list means adding audio/video files to be played to the list in sequence. A streaming media server will play the files in the play list according to the occurrence sequence of the files in the list. A terminal and the streaming media server interact with each other based on a procedure defined by a Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP). The steaming media server controls the play of the entire play list as if the play list is a single file.
A basic streaming media service procedure is: A system administrator publishes a streaming media file via a Content Management System (CMS), where the streaming media file is synchronized to the streaming media server; the streaming media server and the CMS interact to generate an RTSP Universal Resource Identifier (RTSP URI) for the terminal to initiate a video on-demand request; the CMS synchronizes the metadata (including URI, description, and price information) of the streaming media file to an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) server for presentation to the terminal. The terminal accesses the EPG to obtain the URI and initiates an access to the streaming media server via the URI.
During the implementation of the present invention, the inventor discovers that, in the prior art, the RTSP interaction procedure is designed for the control of individual streaming media files and as a result, during the playing of streaming media files, all files in a play list are regarded as one streaming media file. When a user wants to locate a certain file in the list, the user must drag the progress bar of the player or repeat forward and backward operations just like controlling a single file.